For the last 18 months we’ve been working to progress our ambition is to be a digital council in a digital place which has required us to think about digital skills, services, ways of working, technology and connectivity, as well as business intelligence and data.
The way we think about digital can be hard to explain, different organisations have different approaches to digital, and digital means different things to different people.
A new way of working
We have started to work using agile design-led processes, with an emphasis on how to best meet the needs of people living and working in Dorset. Our focus has been on showing the benefits of ‘digital’ for the council by introducing these new ways of working, helping people to understand the types of change we are starting to introduce.
The changes at the council (a new Unitary Council is being created) have meant that there have been limitations to the amount of progress we’ve been able to make so far, but we’ve successfully demonstrated that you can start to make progress without a big budget.
Collaboration is the key here, especially in so many ways for digital. We have found that there are people motivated and wanting to get involved, to improve the way we work and deliver services. Our approach so far in Dorset has been to select areas of our ‘business’ to work with as exemplar design-led/agile projects and seek out other funding opportunities from there.
Looking forward: new skill sets for how we work
Looking forward we’re now more certain from the work we’ve been doing that we need a different set of skills and experience in order to scale a design led and agile approach to service delivery. Our exemplar work has been important in helping to demonstrate this need through doing the work and showing how this approach can start to create more value for residents and our workforce.
We started to make real traction with our new ways of working by restructuring and pooling our ICT business analysts, trainers and enterprise architects creating a new dedicated digital team. We didn’t intend for this team to last forever, but provide initial momentum to help with change. This has been really positive, helping us to focus on a design-led approach and shift from traditional IT training to developing peoples digital skills.
The exemplar projects have helped us to understand agile better and the impact on our existing culture. I’ve just read an article about agile and waterfall at Homes England which rang true, people still want that plan! We’ve also found the shift to small incremental improvement, rather than delivering a shiny system a challenge on occasion. Someone advised me recently this comes down to managing the relationship/expectations really well.
We’ve definitely seen the benefits of agile and design with people becoming really passionate about:
- Multi-disciplinary teams delivering quicker and better outcomes
- Iterative user testing and co-design with users resulting in better solutions
- Small improvements can have a big impact
- The importance of good content whatever the medium it’s in
Finding the right external help has been essential to how we’ve been introducing these changes, we recognised how much we needed people with experience to understand what we were trying to achieve, but also who have same values and want to help us build a lasting capability in the organisation.
The broader digital agenda
It was important to recognise what was already happening in the organisation that was good. We did a baselining exercise to help us identify the areas we needed to think about when developing the initial digital programme of work. This meant talking to lots of people across the organisation and this enabled us to spot great examples of digital already taking place. The strategy has helped to connect the different work/projects taking place and how they relate and compliment each other. We have produced over 50 case studies showcasing work that is helping us to progress our digital maturity across the council.
Making things open
We have found that we can’t communicate what we’re doing enough. At the moment we use sharepoint, yammer, email, posters, Twitter, more recently blogs and LinkedIn. My preference would be dedicated communications support working in the team as it’s a full time job to do it properly. We are lucky to have some great people who have helped us to communicate what we’re doing and the progress that’s been made.
As well as publishing, we have used events like learning at work week and services week to highlight our offer to the organisation. We ran an innovation space to try and create a bit of excitement around digital, and we also run monthly topic sessions, show and tells, master classes, network meetings, established champions, and have built digital learning opportunities like agile and design into our core learning and development programme.
The LocalGov Digital team and work has been brilliant to help connect people working on digital in local government, and Futuregov who we have been working with have been great.
Connecting with other council teams has been important. This week we’ve been talking to Devon about their success around Microsoft digital adoption, we’ve been running three pilots and wanted to understand if there were common issues/what works well to improve our engagement model.
Working in the open is still something we are learning, building up people’s confidence to do this and feeling empowered to share, the number of show and tells are increasing.
A new council
On Monday the new Dorset Council will begin, with one of its founding principles being a data and technology driven organisation, it’s a new and exciting time and a real opportunity to use digital to meet the future needs of residents in Dorset.
